After Childcare

By Veronika Winkels

My friend usually replies to emails promptly. But I was unaware that she had received the gut-wrenching news and was getting her preschool-aged children medically tested and scrambling for any information. This was July, 2025.

They were given the all clear, probably because, as she and her husband learnt, Joshua Brown—the 27-year-old who has been accused of 156 alleged offences, predominantly sexual abuses of preschool children—had only spent a few days working at their children’s centre. But those initial days, hours, minutes of not knowing whether they had been violated, must have been agony. According to The Age, Brown appeared again in court last week, with his legal team failing to convince the magistrate to withhold details of his vile charges from the media.

It’s enough to rattle a nation, and it should do that. It’s devastated many mothers and fathers of small children around the country. Sexual abuse against those who have the potential to retaliate is abhorrent enough. Violence against the voiceless and innocent is an act so reprehensible it’s enough to make us question the whole childcare model upon which our social and economic affairs rely.

With five children under eleven, so far, four of ours have gone through part-time childcare. However, my husband and I have already decided that we will not be placing our youngest, who has just turned one, in a system that has delivered overwhelming and tragic evidence that it cannot unequivocally protect children against the infiltration of sex predators. No longer can we kid ourselves that the childcare outrage which emerged from Queensland in recent years is a blip, an outlier in an otherwise workable system.

And now we have the official proof: the Productivity Commission’s report into early childhood education and care which was released last week, found that serious safety-related incidents in Australia’s childcare sector—including injuries, illnesses, breaches of guidelines and children being lost or otherwise harmed—have risen sharply in recent years, alongside declining staff qualifications and increasing regulatory concerns. Exposing the devastation and trauma too many Australian families have come to experience from childcare providers, the report signals a new shift in the public consciousness around our current economic structure.

For our family, it means we will choose to provide full-time care of our own children at home, even though this means we will remain years away from being in a position to buy a house. One middle-class income isn’t enough to buy a modest family home in an age where even DINKS (double income no kids) struggle to enter the market; and in a highly unstable and limited rental market, sacrificing this stability is a far cry from the Australian dream.

Following the Brown scandal, which is still rocking and scarring families across Melbourne suburbs, similar stories across the country continue to come to light. My more hopeful self—the one that’s been rocked following the revelations that monsters have been lurking amongst young children—still wishes to celebrate the very many beautiful carers that exist.

Yet with the overwhelming evidence of the crisis found by the Productivity Commission’s report, my more cynical self wonders if this has been a ticking time bomb all along. Many studies have shown that while part-time care can be beneficial for such things as social development, emotional regulation and cognitive development, children in full-time childcare suffer from things such as a chronic state of high stress (samples of saliva showed more cortisol—the stress hormone—in children who attend care full-time), emotional deregulation, and even against expectation, educational underdevelopment.

Many voices are spending careers disseminating this message. Anne Manne’s excellent book Motherhood, is a crucial resource for understanding the serious effects of full-time institutional care for infants and toddlers. Journalist Virginia Tapscott is one of our nation's most active advocates for supporting care in the home; and even Michael Leunig weighed in on the subject, with his notorious early childcare cartoon, which I discussed with him in a 2022 interview.

Even now, I wonder more darkly if the new initiative The Resilience Project, adopted by more than 700 centres around the country according to their webpage, is almost a preemptive and tacit confession that childcare centres are not optimal environments for a happy childhood. The project’s mission, “to support children in building their capacity to manage their wellbeing” feels now, with our new terrible knowledge, defunct.

I want to hear from our feminists, our economists, and our leaders about what they propose is the solution. Outsourcing care of young children is not simply a question of necessity for equal opportunity for women hoping to advance their careers. It snuck up on us somewhere in the last quarter century that it takes two incomes, where one used to suffice, to afford a house. Many families are compelled to put their children in care to service the mortgage when they would prefer to be their primary carers.

And what about our government leaders, who have been giving the message via subsidies and other ‘tax breaks’ that women are more valued in the workforce and not at home caring for their young children? Gillard was most vocal—but leaders on the right have also been—that childcare enables women to ‘lead lives of dignity’, as though my role as my children’s primary carer is somehow vulgar.

We were told to get excited and be thankful when subsidised four-year-old kinder gave way to subsidised three-year-old kinder. Yet in Sweden, families are given the freedom to choose between subsidised childcare or financial compensation if they choose not to avail themselves of this care, and provide it themselves. We aren’t offered that kind of choice in Australia. If it is, it has become nominal, not livable, with the cost-of-living crisis.

Not to be naïve and suggest that abuse cannot and does not happen in family homes. But we are right to be more shocked and moved to make changes when abuse happens in institutions. Because somehow this has happened in a ratified setting, with official safeguards in place, protocols and gateways engineered by experts to absolutely guard against the infiltration of predators.

Having exposed the horrors children have been experiencing in our care systems nationwide, we have before us the brokenness of the whole economic model we have built our nation upon; backing ourselves into a corner, depending on the increased availability of both parents in the workforce. Yet now, more than ever, the choice to care for our own children must be made financially viable for families.

Governments which fail to make provisions for this, by way of more tax breaks for families, affordable housing, addressing the cost-of-living crisis, and better supporting communal supports for young families, like outreach programs and churches, are all part of the multilayered solution.

And I often imagine how things might be if the Howard government had implemented split-income tax for single-income households all those years ago, as it was so close to doing. For my family’s situation, as most, it would have been life changing.

If our government was once close to following in the United States' footsteps to enact this, that possibility feels scarcely imaginable now. But here’s something else we could move towards as a nation, to help families be their children’s strongest early childhood presence: ease regulations and implement more supports for small businesses to allow one parent—usually the mother—to exercise her entrepreneurial talents in a small home-run business, and tailor a work/family existence that suits her family’s situation and needs.

Big business is the enemy of small children. Local, family businesses, which once thrived in our country, are now a critically endangered species. Empty shop fronts across the nation attest to this. But making home businesses more viable will be a crucial part in addressing what we should now be calling a National Childcare Crisis.

Just to further prove that the system really is broken, are new complaints from childcare staff that the increased restrictions on physical contact with children is limiting their abilities to perform basic needs like changing nappies. We forget too, that skin-to-skin is hugely important for children’s sense of belonging, security and emotional development. A child who trips and grazes a knee needs a hug, a pat, a kiss on the head. What are we doing when we place our children in an environment where this is made impossible?

The brokenness of outsourcing the care of our young children to businesses which have systematically failed to screen paedophiles and become scenes of sadistic sexual crimes has been exposed at critical mass. Childcare that has been for too long been motivated by capital gain before genuine care has exposed the unfitness of our whole economic model.

The endemic abuse, or if not actual abuse, the endemic risk of unspeakable harm to infants and toddlers in our care systems should be enough to force policy-makers to readjust our nation’s economic values and incentive models, which are currently disempowering parents, and especially mothers, who would like the chance to be the primary carers of their children in their most vulnerable time of life.

The danger now is that we will not heed the lesson which has cost unfathomable trauma for countless families in our communities, and fail to see this crisis for what it is—an enormous cultural moment. There are plenty of people who have too much skin in the game, and not enough courage to relinquish it, who will deny this. There will be those who accuse people like me of being alarmist. But they now face more doubt from more people than ever before.

It is madness to subordinate human values to GDP, to give no room for the protection and flourishing of our most vulnerable in their most vital stage of life. No one wants this more than the mothers and fathers of those small lives. Rather than financially penalise parents for wanting to parent, we need to give them the tax breaks they need to be able to exercise that basic right.

Women’s Forum Australia is an independent think tank that undertakes research, education and public policy advocacy on issues affecting women and girls, with a particular focus on addressing behaviours and practices that are harmful and abusive to them. We are a non-partisan, non-religious, tax-deductible charity. We do not receive any government funding and rely solely on donations to make an impact. Support our work today.